Orphan Mental Health Project Wins 2nd Place at ChangeWorks Competition

Duke Junior Craig Moxley, a public policy major pursuing a certificate in global health and minor in Spanish, has won 2^nd place and $3,000 in the Duke ChangeWorks Competition for his project on orphan mental health. The project called COPE, is fully operational today in rural Uganda and is filling a need for counseling services that target orphaned and vulnerable children.

Craig worked on the project under the mentorship of DGHI faculty member Sumi Ariely and with partners in the rural area of Naama, Uganda, where he completed DGHI fieldwork last summer. Global health student and senior Grace Zhou helped develop the idea for the project two years ago, in connection with DGHI faculty member Kathryn Whetten and the POFO research project. Another team of students funded by DGHI will return to Naama this summer to continue working on COPE. 

Q & A WITH CRAIG MOXLEY

What is COPE?

COPE, which stands for Counseling Orphans, Promoting Empowerment, provides psychosocial counseling services, career counseling and material support to 50 community-based orphaned and vulnerable children on a bi-weekly basis. The program has been fully operational for one year during our pilot phase. Ugandan partner Nakafeero Robinah serves as the General Manager of the program and she is supported by a local government official who uses his knowledge of the community to recruit children and work with guardians.

Robinah and I developed the structure of the program together, but the idea for the program, as well as an initial model for the program, came from Graze Zhou, a past student researcher who worked in Naama. We built the intervention based on Grace’s research that demonstrated how community-based orphans had worse emotional outcomes compared to their institutionalized counterparts. Today the program is almost entirely operated locally and has an average of 40 enrolled children. After spending a year in the program, the participants graduate and a new group is recruited. Once the children graduate, we hope to keep them connected with the program by setting them up as mentors to the new children who enter the program.

We believe the program is essential because it provides the children -- all of whom have been identified as having suffered particular emotional trauma -- with a more solid emotional foundation, a clear roadmap toward career opportunities within and outside of the villages to address the inequities that often arise from their status and (potentially) negative home environments. The new Project Naama SRT students, notably Sejal Lahoti and Ben Ramsey, as well as COPE’s IT manager Noelle Suafian, were fundamental in our ChangeWorks pitch, and Dr. Ariely has always gone out of her way to make herself accessible to us and ask the right questions about the direction of the organization.

How did you get involved in this project and why is it important to you.

I became involved in COPE after my original research project failed.  In Naama, I had aimed to measure the emotional outcomes of children enrolled in a counseling program versus similar children who had no exposure to counseling services. It was only after I arrived in Naama that I found that there was essentially no program. However, the need was still there, and our community partners expressed an interest in having a sustainable, community-run program. Robinah and I brainstormed potential strategies, and after trying out a few different ideas, we came up with the new model. Since then we’ve held regular sessions every other Saturday since July. A great implicit benefit from working with COPE is that I still feel connected with the community as we discuss the program on a regular basis.

COPE won  2^nd place in ChangeWorks. How will this help your project?

Our plan is contingent on how the data from our program evaluations comes back this summer.  One option is to expand the program to three new program sites, scaling our current model, which is the direction we had originally envisioned. The program’s recruiter, a local government official, Robinah, and counselors who lead the sessions have proposed creating a parallel program that meets on a less regular basis but works entirely with the guardians of the community-based orphans and vulnerable children. The idea would be to educate the guardians on how to improve the emotional and physical health of the children. All of these strategies involve expanding human resources.

What has your path in global health at Duke been like so far?

After returning from a DukeEngage experience in Nicaragua, I wanted to learn more about the drivers behind population health in developing communities so I began the global health certificate. It was in the intro course during my first semester back that I heard about a second fieldwork opportunity in Naama, Uganda with DGHI’s Student Research Training Program. This proved to be the most formative educational experience I’ve had at Duke. I had the opportunity to work with student researchers, Dr. Ariely, Dr. Kigongo, and Lysa MacKeen for six months prior to the fieldwork experience.  Along with my fieldwork partner Genny Olson, I had the opportunity to plan a community health fair for 1,300 individuals, build a localized tool for community leaders to use in data collection, respond to community calls for a counseling program by developing the COPE model, and teach at Naama Preparatory School. While working in Naama, I became interested in the capital gap between the town of Mityana where we lived and the villages where we worked. As a result, I’m currently researching the intersection between microeconomics and health outcomes in hopes of developing a global health thesis on the topic. The amount of support that’s been available from professors and faculty members within DGHI has really proved to be the cornerstone of my Duke experience.

Is global health work a possibility in your future career?

I would love to stay involved with global health by working with health-based entrepreneurs in developing countries by working for an accelerator, research institution, or the government. My dream is to found or work for an impact investing firm that is investing in scalable, high-impact ideas that increase access to health or financial services in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa.

** The global health project Benefactory won 3^rd place in the Duke ChangeWorks Competition. Involving Duke students Connor Cotton, Mona Dai and Kushal Seetharam, the project seeks to create opportunity, energy and environmental security from wastewater in Togo. The low-maintenance and cost-effective system uses feces, urine and non-potable water to produce electricity, fertilizers and feedstock for fish.